Sunday, September 10, 2006

Sundaram Samskritam

"The Sanskrit language is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either"
- Sir William Jones, Third Address to the Asiatick Society of Bengal

It is very unfortunate that most Indians lack the knowledge of Sanskrit - That means we have a big chest of treasure, but do not have the key to open it :(
A huge amount of literature full of wisdom, exquisite poetry and science is inaccessible to us.

Though my knowledge of Sanskrit is just the tip of the iceberg, typing in Sanskrit, printing out verses of wisdom, etc have been my wishes for quite a long time.

Like Kuralsoft quenched my thirst of Tamil computing, Baraha was the end
of my search for a good Sanskrit software, This was created by a gentleman called Sheshadrivasu Chandrasekharan. He started with Kannada - with an aim of sending emails to his mother who did not read English. It was then extended to other Indian languages too. Though some Sanskrit experts say that certain complex consonant combinations are not supported well by Baraha, it suits most of my Sanskrit typing needs.

Baraha integrates nicely with standard Windows Apps like MS Office. It has a transliteration scheme that allows you to type using the standard English keyboard.


Baraha can be downloaded for free here.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Unusual Week

My energy has been unusually high this week. Some unusual things I did:
  • Tried (and succeeded partly) to stay consciously relaxed throughout my day - be it at office or home.
  • Walked from office to home on 4 days of the week (more than 3 kms distance). My legs did not ache a bit. On Friday, I became more walk-hungry and hence did a round each inside 2 nearby parks before going home. I was a bit baffled when I found myself enjoying the process !
  • Got a caprice to try out an interesting idea that sprung in my head, at work in the morning. Finished implementing it on the same evening, which I had thought would take longer.
  • Cracked a couple of data structure problems with unusual ease, thanks to the new fresher in our team.
Contrastingly, today(Saturday) was different, still unusual though.
  • Got up in the morning and decided to do something serious that I had n't planned at all. Anxiety shot up.
  • During the day, I was involved in something that kept me anxious.
  • What I had always thought to be my strength - let me down totally.
  • Used auto rickshaw and walked very little. Now, its time to go to bed, my legs are aching !
Do I see a pattern ? The first point in each of the above scenarios tells me something...